Masturbation: “An Evolutionary Magic Trick”

In the climactic scene of Woody Allen’s clever and self-consciously juvenile film Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, Allen’s character is a sperm cell who is waiting for his big moment. Allen’s character is not happy with his assigned fate. Nor does he get to decide when his moment will come. That is left to the operators in the “brain room,” a bustling control center that resembles a space station.

At one point, a brain operator issues a desperate order: “Have memory think of baseball players to keep sperm from premature launching.” The memory operator then begins to calmly transmit these words into a phone: “Willie Mays. Joe Namath. Mickey Mantle.”